Let Your Kids Fail
Early in my career, a mother came to my office to discuss her daughter’s calculus grade. When parents make this kind of request, I try to manage expectations by saying that as a school administrator, I have never changed a grade. Still, hopeful parents persist. In this case, the student had received a B, which her mother saw as a blemish on her otherwise spotless transcript. “I’m worried about how this will look to colleges,” she told me. “Is there any extra credit she can do?”
I explained that it’s okay to earn a B in a challenging course, and that her daughter might benefit from the experience of not being perfect. The mother looked at me as if I had suggested her child take up base jumping. “She’s never gotten a B before,” she said. “I don’t know how she’ll handle it.”
That kind of exchange perfectly captures a paradox of contemporary parenting: In trying to protect their children from any hint of failure, many parents risk making them more fragile. For years, parents and psychologists have been debating how much parental support is too much. But the stakes feel different now. In a world rife with anxiety, intensive parenting has become even more intensive, and some parents are deploying ever more sophisticated strategies to manage their children’s lives—initiating protracted grade appeals, trying to protect their child’s self-esteem by finding a part for everyone in a play, carefully curating extracurriculars to optimize their kid’s future. This happens even as teens take their first steps away from home and into independent adulthood. (Some parents, for instance, now hire “rush consultants” to help guide their kid through the process of getting into a sorority.)
[Read: When helicopter parents touch down—at college]
Too many parents, probably unwittingly, are conditioning their kids to be afraid of losing. But experiencing failure and learning to recover from it are prerequisites for long-term success and, crucially, for mental health.
In explaining this to people, I’ve taken to drawing an analogy from immunology and the concept of “acquired immunity”—the body’s ability to recognize and fight off pathogens and other threats it has previously encountered. Consider peanuts allergies: For years, pediatricians told parents to avoid exposing children to peanuts and other known allergens during infancy, believing that this would protect kids from dangerous allergic reactions. This advice coincided, though, with a spike in severe peanut allergies. The guidance was reversed in 2017, and since then, researchers have found that peanut allergies have meaningfully declined. Scientists studying food allergies theorize that when a person is exposed early to an allergen, their body can learn that the allergen is harmless, just as a body’s immune system learns to produce antibodies when it encounters a weakened form of a virus through vaccination. The next time a person encounters that pathogen, they’re protected.
I’ve come to believe that failure works in a comparable way—that it is in a child’s best interest to be exposed early to manageable setbacks, so they can develop what we might call “failure immunity,” the psychological antibodies that allow them to face future disappointments without falling apart. This requires practice—specifically, practice at encountering obstacles and pushing through them. You can’t develop perseverance if you’ve never had to persevere.
Ann S. Masten, a developmental psychologist, describes resilience as “ordinary magic,” the result of normal developmental processes rather than extraordinary personal qualities. But those processes require what she calls “adaptive systems,” one of the most important of which involves the capacity to learn to cope with stress. Children who are consistently shielded from everyday challenges don’t get to practice this coping. When they inevitably encounter larger disappointments—a college rejection, a romantic breakup—they might lack the psychological fortitude to handle it.
The consequences of never failing show up in children’s mental health. Many young people feel enormous pressure to be perfect, and this perfectionism can have a serious cost. When children absorb the message that failure is catastrophic, even minor mistakes can feel unbearable. I’ve seen students fall apart over a single poor test result. “That’s not me,” a tearful student recently told me. “I’m not someone who gets bad grades.”
[Read: Perfectionism can become a vicious cycle in families]
This is what happens when we deny children the opportunity to develop failure immunity. They don’t learn that disappointment is survivable, that mistakes are instructive, and that temporary misfortune is, well, temporary.
I was a young instructor at Outward Bound, where I led backcountry expeditions in the Minnesota Boundary Waters, when I first began to understand failure immunity. The first Outward Bound school was developed more than 80 years ago, and was inspired in part by the rescue service at Gordonstoun, a Scottish boarding school—where, alongside their academic studies, students joined emergency-response teams to fight fires, search for lost hikers, and assist with maritime rescues. A core principle of Outward Bound is that “young people grow when they take on real challenges.” The program doesn’t assign letter grades. But if you aren’t paying attention when your instructor demonstrates how to set up a tent, you might leave your groundsheet exposed; when rain soaks your sleeping bag, you quickly learn the importance of tucking the groundsheet under the tent. You learn because you have to, typically by messing up first. In other words, the program is a crash course in failure immunity.
How can parents help children develop this sort of resilience? The first step is to resist the urge to rescue. When a child struggles with homework, a parent’s instinct might be to provide answers. When a kid encounters a difficult teacher, a parent might want to intervene. When they break a school rule and receive a consequence, a parent might fire off emails to administrators complaining of unfairness. But each intervention sends a message to the child: You can’t handle this.
Choosing not to step in doesn’t mean abandoning children to weather challenges alone. It means providing support while still allowing them to experience stress. When one of my daughters was in high school, she regularly lost sleep over English papers. She worshipped her teacher and didn’t want to disappoint them, so she wrote entire drafts that she would toss out, weeping, saying that her ideas weren’t good enough. As a parent, I was gutted to see this repeatedly unfolding, and I found myself wanting to insert myself—to either help with the draft or beg the teacher for some sort of absolution. It turned out, however, that this struggle was part of my daughter’s writing process. She recently mused about how much easier college has been, given the way she “tortured” herself over writing in high school. It was painful, yet somehow important and necessary for her.
Parents can also normalize failure as part of a meaningful life. Instead of treating mistakes as shameful secrets, we can proudly claim them as integral to our stories. My own kids have heard about my failed bids for a job, about school initiatives that have flopped, about times I fell short as a boss. I share these stories not to burden them but to help put failure in perspective. Research on the theory of social learning, by the psychologist Albert Bandura and others, shows that children develop coping strategies by observing how their parents respond to adversity. When parents model resilience—acknowledging disappointment while showing that they can solve problems and regulate their emotions—children learn these same skills.
Perhaps most important, parents would do well to examine their own relationship with failure. Many parents’ anxieties about their kid stem from a personal fear—that a bad grade means their child won’t get into a good college, that a stumble today could derail their future. But my experience tells me that the opposite is true. The kid who gets straight A’s through high school may struggle more in college than the one who foundered in ninth grade, figured out what went wrong, and then kept going. When we allow kids the satisfaction of overcoming hurdles on their own, we give them something more powerful and durable than a perfect transcript or an undefeated season: confidence in their ability to recover and come back stronger.
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